The Power in the title refers to the United States' military, diplomatic and financial strength to pursue its interests in the Middle East.

[1] Faith, in the words of Oren, refers to "impact of religion in the shaping of American attitudes and policies toward the Middle East.

[3] In Oren's own words: "[Contemporary] American policy- makers, it will be shown, wrestled with many of the same challenges in the area faced by their ... predecessors and similarly strove to reconcile their strategic and ideological interests.

The objective [of this final section] is to enable Americans to read about the fighting in Iraq and hear the echoes of the Barbary wars and Operation Torch [the code name for the American landing in North Africa in World War II] or to follow presidential efforts to mediate between Palestinians and Israelis and see the shadows of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.

One can compile a long list of major American foreign-policy decisions, by no means all of them regarding the Middle East—entering World War I, the Marshall Plan, intervening in Bosnia and Kosovo, etc.—that arguably had, alongside their purely pragmatic calculations, a genuine element of idealism, without which it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to obtain support for them from the American public.